As I start writing this article it’s a Saturday night/Sunday morning (roughly 3:30am GMT time) and I was about to complete an online order with the DIY store B&Q and I find B&Q have actually taken their site offline to do a PLANNED update!!!
WOW, WOW, WOW!!!
I have about £300 worth of kitchen products in my B&Q basket (new kitchen work surface, sink, taps and a kitchen cabinet: time to update the kitchen) and I can’t complete the order!
SEO Marketing Mistake!
B and Q We’ll be Back Soon Notice
This is dumb from both a brand marketing and SEO perspective.
SEO wise Google will index this notice for every webpage they index while the site is down for maintenance: this could damage SERPs.
Marketing wise this is an amateur move, what sort of multi-million pound business takes a website offline to do an upgrade. Upgrades should be seamless, barely noticeable, NOT take a site out of action so customers can’t complete orders!!!
Good Luck Hiring Skilled Marketing Professionals with SEO Qualifications
I’m not an expert on DIY, but I’d assume B&Q would get a lot of traffic on a weekend, so this is not the best time for their site to be unavailable. I’m totally shocked a business as big as B&Q (2015-16 revenue of £3.8 billion and employ 25,000 staff) would have a webmaster(s) this stupid.
WOW
Update: the B&Q domain was like this for days, even when it went live it was only partially functional! They must have lost tens of thousands of £s in lost sales!
David Law
Website - SEO Gold Services
